In today's work environment voice mail has become a very important and useful tool. Essentially voice mail relates to voice messages left by a caller on a telephone system, where the person called is able to retrieve the voice mail later. Many voice mail messages are digitized and stored in a computer system as a digital signal, such that the voice mail subscriber may retrieve the messages using a telephone or a computer system, such as through email.
Most businesses have the ability to store voice mail messages for their employees. These businesses create, in essence, an internal, proprietary communication or messaging system. These internal communication systems receive telephone calls from the outside world over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and transform the voice mail into a digital signal that is stored using the proprietary messaging system. Once a voice mail is stored on the proprietary system, a voice mail subscriber, e.g., an employee of that company, can forward the voice mail to other voice mail subscribers or employees of that company as long as they are subscribers of the company's messaging system.
In order to achieve forwarding type functions, the voice mail system typically maintains a directory of various subscribers or employees and their respective phone numbers. This directory is used to route incoming calls to the proper telephone and to transfer or forward a voice mail message to another subscriber within the system. In essence, a subscriber on the system is able to select functionality from the phone itself and transfer or forward an existing voice mail that was assigned to her own phone number to another phone number within the system itself.
Unfortunately, however, voice mail subscribers of one proprietary system are not able to forward voice mail messages from their proprietary system to a user on a separate or different voice mail system. In particular, the existence of the closed or proprietary voice mail system creates a system of incompatibility across the various proprietary voice mail communication systems.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.